PITTSBURGH — Andy Warhol captured Andrew Rossi's imagination from the time he was a kid checking out the Pittsburgh native's artwork at New York City galleries and watching his many television appearances.
"His whole world seemed fun and punk but in an '80s glamour kind of way," Rossi told the Post-Gazette. "As someone figuring out their sexuality like me as a bisexual man, the courage he had to be queer and have a sort of empire at The Factory felt very exciting, and I wanted to know more."
Warhol died in 1987, but Rossi's thirst to learn more about him was fulfilled in 1989 with the release of "The Andy Warhol Diaires," a memoir Warhol dictated over the course of 11 years to his close friend, Pat Hackett. While Warhol spent most of his life guarding his true thoughts and feelings, the book was a relatively unfiltered account of his inner monologue from 1976 through the days leading up to his death.
Rossi immediately purchased a copy in 1989 but didn't fully examine its contents until more than two decades later. By then, he was an established documentary filmmaker who realized Warhol's musings were rich with melodrama and "lent themselves to an episodic story structure." That sent Rossi down a path that culminated in him writing and directing the six-part docuseries adaptation of "The Andy Warhol Diaries" that premiered Wednesday on Netflix.
"It felt like [the diary entries] presented a story arc that would be ripe for adaptation," he said. "Once I started reading them, it was the love story I felt so connected to and was so revelatory."
What Rossi is referring to is the artist's romantic entanglements with Jed Johnson and Jon Gould, as well as his ambiguously defined personal and professional relationship with fellow artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. There isn't much information available about Warhol's love life beyond the diary entries, which Rossi believes was a calculated effort to avoid being persecuted due to his sexuality.
Rossi especially wanted to spotlight Warhol's relationship with Gould. The diary entries regarding his pursuit of Gould read "like a young lover obsessed," Rossi said, and reveal a more vulnerable side of the notoriously private artist.
Gould died in 1986 from complications stemming from HIV/AIDS. A segment of the docuseries takes place at a 2017 estate sale auctioning off Gould's personal effects that includes poetry dedicated to Warhol.
"I think that knowing the depth of their love and Andy's sacrifice to help Jon while he was sick ... changes our perception of Andy as a cold, detached figure incapable of love," Rossi said. "It also informs our reading on some of his paintings."
No Warhol documentary would be complete without exploring his childhood in Pittsburgh. Rossi said he and his crew visited the Steel City on three separate occasions while putting together "The Andy Warhol Diaries." They collected footage from near his childhood home in Oakland, the St. John Chrysostom Byzantine Catholic Church in Greenfield that his family attended, The Andy Warhol Museum on the North Side and other locales.
A lot of context on Warhol's life and work is provided by museum director Patrick Moore and curator Jessica Beck. In addition to being a valuable resource for his docuseries, Rossi appreciated how The Andy Warhol Museum supports creatives operating outside the mainstream and its "forward look at young artists who are going to continue the legacy of Andy Warhol."
"Pittsburgh is everything to understanding Andy Warhol," he said. "Andy's journey begins in Pittsburgh, and so does this series. It is foundational to his journey."
One element of the series that has drawn early attention is Rossi's decision to have Warhol narrate the diary entries by combining an AI re-creation of his voice with line readings spoken by the actor Bill Irwin. Rossi wanted audiences to experience Warhol's diary in his own voice. He also said using AI played into Warhol's fascination with machines and his stated desire to eventually become one.
Artificially re-created versions of famous voices don't always go over well with fans, as evidenced by the backlash sparked by posthumously using celebrity chef and television host Anthony Bourdain's voice in last summer's "Roadrunner" documentary. Rossi hopes that the Warhol faithful understand that his intent here was "for people to experience it as another Warholian portrait."
"It's such an unusual, extraordinary window into the real him in contrast to the interviews he used to do where he'd be evasive and turn the interview into a performance," Rossi said. "I thought, 'This voice needs to come through to the viewer in all its raw truth.' Having an actor come in the middle of that and make Andy's voice be about another person's interpretation would continue the performance with someone else."
We know so little about Warhol's personal life due to that era's rampant homophobia and his deliberate attempts to avoid as much of that ugliness as possible, Rossi said. "The Andy Warhol Diaries" is designed to fill in some of those blanks.
"Peeling back the curtain to reveal his relationships that in many cases were full of pain but also beauty and joy is part of the effort to go back in time and break down the prejudices that have kept things hidden and erased," Rossi said. "My goal was to unerase his biography."
